Novel Quotes
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When I write a novel I put into play all the information inside me. It might be Japanese information or it might be Western; I don't draw a distinction between the two.
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When I start getting close to the end of a novel, something registers in the back of my mind for the next novel, so that I usually don't write, or take notes. And I certainly don't begin. I just allow things to percolate for a while.
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People who wrote literary novels about the past probably didn't want them pegged as historical fiction. Certainly that was true in England.
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I can't imagine how American readers will react to a novel, but if the story is appealing it doesn't matter much if you don't catch all the detail. I'm not too familiar with the geography of nineteenth century London, for instance, but I still enjoy reading Dickens.
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If the masses are not thrown a few novels , they may react by throwing up a few barricades.
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Characters are the key to a good book. It took me several novels to comprehend that.
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The only thing which can tell us about the novel is the novel.
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We could live like counts. ... If all that money is out there, I might as well hack a little on the side and put the novel off.
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I don’t want what we’re doing to just end up as notes for a novel.
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I mean, there are many other directors who are probably both more skilled and excited to adapt novels or work within certain genre conventions. I'd like to do that kind of work someday, but for better or worse I'm too drawn by my own material.
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What a joy it is to read a book that shocks one into remembering just how high one's literary standards should be.... a tour de force by one of England's best novelists.... Atonement is a spectacular book; as good a novel - and more satisfying... - than anything McEwan has written....sublimely written narrative.... The Dunkirk passage is a stupendous piece of writing, a set piece that could easily stand on its own.
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...By far the most usual way of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for a serious rearrangement of our preconceptions is to ignore them altogether, or to abuse those who bear witness for them.
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There are often references to childhood, but they're rarely the focus of the [my] novels.
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Somehow, you can achieve a directness in the novel that you can't get anywhere else.
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Being in a Chinese coal mine for 30 years is like an epic novel. It's tragic.
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Information, defined intuitively and informally, might be something like 'uncertainty's antidote.' This turns out also to be the formal definition- the amount of information comes from the amount by which something reduces uncertainty...The higher the [information] entropy, the more information there is. It turns out to be a value capable of measuring a startling array of things- from the flip of a coin to a telephone call, to a Joyce novel, to a first date, to last words, to a Turing test...Entropy suggests that we gain the most insight on a question when we take it to the friend, colleague, or mentor of whose reaction and response we're least certain. And it suggests, perhaps, reversing the equation, that if we want to gain the most insight into a person, we should ask the question of qhose answer we're least certain... Pleasantries are low entropy, biased so far that they stop being an earnest inquiry and become ritual. Ritual has its virtues, of course, and I don't quibble with them in the slightest. But if we really want to start fathoming someone, we need to get them speaking in sentences we can't finish.
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Everyone has early fiction fantasies, but it wasn't until my second child Betsy was born that I allowed the urge to write a novel bubble up.
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I think of my novels as entertainments.
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Writing a first novel takes so much effort, with such little promise of result or reward, that it must necessarily be a labour of love bordering on madness.
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Great fiction shows us not how to conduct our behavior but how to feel. Eventually, it may show us how to face our feelings and face our actions and to have new inklings about what they mean. A good novel of any year can initiate us into our own new experience.
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Often it's the latest novel that I've written that is my favourite. I'd been dreaming it for so long, living and breathing its story so that when it finally arrives as a newly published book, smelling wonderful and fresh out of the box, there is nothing like it.
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Your interviews or blog posts or whatever are less supplements to your novel than part of it. I'm not private, but I believe in literary form - I'll use my life as material for art (I don't know how not to do this) and I'll use art as a way of exploring that passage of life into art and vice versa, but that's not the same thing as thinking that any of the details of my life are interesting or relevant on their own.
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I do think that sports is really rich dramatically that, and this is kind of a self-serving thing to say, but I wonder why there aren't more, better sports novels.
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When you work on a graphic novel or a film with people you've been together through a lot and you've exposed your secrets and weaker sides to each other.
